Self-Interest and Incompetence

Abstract

All social science's schools have a common assumption: self- interests is the central variable explaining human behavior in society. The author has no contention about that. But says that in contemporary societies a second variable is turning increasingly relevant when one is willing to explain social outcomes: policymakers' technical and emotional incompetence. Incompetent policymakers, who fail to choose the alternative more consistent with their own objectives, even when interests were neutralized, always existed. But now, that an increasing number of social outcomes are dependent on government policy, competence turned strategic. Besides self-interest, competence must be assessed when one evaluates social outcomes. Social sciences have always been the playing field of controversy. Some advances are eventually achieved, some issues are overcome, and the object of controversy changes. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, for instance, the main divide, within sociology, was between conflict (mostly Marxist) and functionalist views of society; within economics, between the Keynesian and neoclassical schools. Today the major divide is between methodological individualism and methodological historicism, i.e., between the doctrine that social structure and social change are exclusively the outcome of individual decisions, in such way that social scientists will advance knowledge as long as they look for the microfoundations or rational bases behind, and the doctrine that many social and economical phenomena can be explained by social and economic structures, by macro or holist historical forces, which presuppose interests behind, but do not explain social and economic change by adding individual behaviors. Yet, all schools have in common one assumption: interests are the element that moves people and explains behavior. The classical philosophers were more concerned with the passions than with the interests. But, as Hirschman demonstrated, since the sixteenth century the interests of individuals and groups came increasingly to the center of the stage. They comprised the totality of human aspirations, but, differently from the passions, they denoted an element of reflection and calculation. In the following century they started to be viewed as economic aspirations, and became central to economic reasoning. 1 Today neoclassical economists and rational choice political theorists will adopt methodological individualism and will speak of individuals' interests or of groups' interests, while Marxists will refer to class interests and will adopt methodological historicism; but all will assume that interests drive people. Interests may be passionate